It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses who cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor.  We shall do this, therefore, in describing the condition of Ireland during the eighteenth century.  We find the Lord Chancellor of England declaring, during the first half of that period, that “in the eye of the law no Catholic existed in Ireland.”  The Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine:  “It appears plain that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.”  The law, therefore, as created by England for Ireland, deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral rights four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a lawful prey to the remaining fifth:  a band of colonists and adventurers, who favored the policy of the party then dominant in England.  This was the condition of the law.  We shall see, presently, what was its result on the life of the nation.  It should be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which arise when one nation undertakes to govern another.  For it must be clearly understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true insight into the spirit and will of the Most High.  It was, indeed, on this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their whole policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination against the holders of a certain form of faith?

[Illustration:  Salmon Fishery, Galway.]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the Congress of the United States sent its sympathy in these words to the people of Ireland:  “We know that you are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine.  Even the tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you.  In the rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for her destruction.”

Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the Irish people:  “The misery and distress which your ill-fated country has been so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by such a combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world, has most sincerely affected your friends in America, and has engaged the most serious attention of Congress.”

It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of misery and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant what they said.  Franklin’s letter brings us to the eve of the Volunteer Movement, of which much has been said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems to have wrought evil rather than good.  This Movement, at first initiated wholly by the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was later widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to gain certain legislative favors from England, with the result that a Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed to.